Learning by foraging: The impact of social tags on knowledge acquisition

Abstract

In the last few years, social tagging systems have become a standard application of the World Wide Web. These systems can be considered as shared external knowledge structures of users on the Internet. In this paper, we describe how social tagging systems relate to individual semantic memory structures and how social tags affect individual processes of learning and information foraging. Furthermore, we present an experimental online study aimed at evaluating this interaction of external and internal structures of spreading activation. We report on effects of social tagging systems as visualized collective knowledge representations on individual processes of information search and learning. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.